this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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I'd love to blame this entirely on DOGE and trump but honestly this was a perfect storm that built up over decades.
The screwworm was eradicated from the US a long time ago using sterile fly releases that pushed the population progressively southward until the Darién Gap became the permanent chokepoint. They maintained the barrier there with sterile fly releases and ground monitoring and it worked. It worked so well that the Mission, Texas facility closed in 1981 and the Mexico facility closed in 1999 because there was no longer a need for them.
That success is part of what caused the problem. Complacency set in, and capacity eroded. Then COVID wrecked the monitoring infrastructure. Ground teams couldn't operate, sterile fly releases got disrupted, and the barrier at the Gap was breached. The flies started moving north again and the program didn't have the capacity it once did to respond.
DOGE cuts to USDA APHIS in 2025 hit an already compromised program at the worst possible time reduced staffing and funding when they needed to be scaling up emergency sterile fly production and reestablishing the barrier.
So yes, the current administration made it worse. The vulnerability was already there before those cuts, and once COVID broke the barrier there was always a real chance they were going to make it back to the US regardless.
Fuck DOGE and trump though for real, I just cant get on this "its entirely their fault" train.
So trump is just the last in line whose failure was worst.
That still makes it his fault
He was the one that broke it at first too. It's just Musk that came later and only finished breaking it.
Nah it was a series of overconfidence and underfunding, this is capitalism.
Ah yes, let them blame COVID instead. Because we all know in hindsight that Trump’s response to the pandemic was amazing \s
They’d also cut funding to vaccine and pandemic research in his first term. So it was his fault at more than one step along the way.
That old lady was standing near the edge of the cliff. The fence was already broken. I pushed her off the edge. You can't say it's entirely my fault.
And to be fair, I was wantonly shoving a whole bunch of people, and lots of them didn't die. The ones who did had some preexisting vulnerability, so not my fault.
This part is sort of glossed over. There was a report in 2018 that the Panama facility was in dire need of updates. We were talking about a one time $50M investment and an extra $10-15M a year to hold screwworms at the Darien Gap as they had been for decades. Trump did nothing. It's easy to blame COVID, but there is a very, very avoidable problem and yes, the blame lies squarely with Trump.
It's very refreshing to see something so nuanced actually getting upvoted here.
I thought you said it was "frustrating" seeing some with nuance get upvoted and I appreciated the sarcasm on that and the sincerity in this one
I dunno, this just seems like the entire narrative that government ran things are bad. I mean sure everything was crumbling when Trump started actively breaking things with Doge. But the reason they were crumbling before that was Republican policy and Covid was absolutely Trump's fault from dismantling the programs that monitored pandemics.
Any government run system needs something to trim the bloat down. Otherwise there is nothing to stop it becoming dangerous. Capitalism relies on profit motives to do this. It works, to an extent.
The problem comes with how to trim. E.g. this programme. Once the barrier was established, it could be trimmed. The fact it worked for 25 years after is proof of this. This (in theory) would free up resources for more critical tasks. The catch is that it needed to hard protect the barrier itself. It also needed the capability to rapidly scale back up. It seems that that was trimmed too, leading to the current crisis.
A dam is a good analogy. It takes a lot of resources to build one. But far less to run and maintain it. You also need the option for emergency maintenance, but that can be shared with other dams or construction projects, when not needed.
The first trim got rid of the construction budget. DOGE got rid of the maintenance budget. Now the dam needs rebuilding, not just maintaining.
What does this even mean. Sounds like slippery slope to me.
No department, government or commercial likes giving up resources, once it has them. This can cause them to become quite inefficient.
In commercial companies, this is corrected for by financial pressures (imperfectly). In government systems there is no obvious mechanism. Instead it's a lot more ad-hoc. This allows for things like "starving the beast" to break government functions. Conversely it allows for a lot of public money being funneled into private hands.
A better option is to have systems in place to control spending. Critically, those systems need to have people who understand what is being done. They simultaneously allow for reduction in spending when appropriate (or at least stop run away), but stop the chainsaw to the knees approach (e.g. DOGE under musk).
A good example would be something like the UKs NHS NICE (National institute for Clinical Excellence). They keep drug prices under control in the NHS. They are powerful enough to give pause to the drugs companies, they stop the government from going "chainsaw massacre" directly and they keep the NHS efficient in their area. They are also small enough to not bloat themselves as easily.
They act as a 2 way shield. They stop governments sticking their oar in too directly. They also keep the service efficient and updated.
Basically we need localised intelligence to filter what rolls down from higher government, while keeping those below accountable.
In this case, it seems like they over trimmed the science. Some stand down from full height is reasonable, but no mothballed facilities were kept to rapidly spool back up in an emergency.
Thank you for the context. Highly appreciated! I had gathered the gradual decline in funding and surveillance from this publication but they didn't really talk about the damages done by COVID or DOGE.
so this is another thing that can be traced back to Reagan? lol
well if it wasnt cut, there would be a much faster response than it is now. 1bn likely wont stop the screworms in the long run anyways. since they are coming from the south unabated.
Nuanced perspective with historical context is so good. Thank you for sharing it. This is not sarcasm; it's authentically good to see.
Okay cool then use that same train of thought to make all those involved pay, not the taxpayers. Musk and Trump too.